Tracking the Elusive Compliance Beast

No matter the size of your company, there are going to be laws and regulations that mandate certain kinds of training. Companies have to stay in strict compliance with these mandates, or else face penalties. OSHA, for example, penalizes companies every year for lapses in required training or training inefficiencies.

This creates a need for delivering compliance training quickly and efficiently, and then proving that the training was completed according to the pertinent laws and regulations. This is where the exercise gets difficult. If you have hundreds or thousands of employees, all in different locations, delivery cannot be a “one and done,” and tracking completion becomes a nightmare.

Indeed, a 2015 Benchmark Report on Ethics and Compliance, conducted by NAVEX Global, found that 53% of compliance training decision-makers listed having “limited hours” available for training as one of their top concerns. Twenty-one percent listed it as their #1 concern. Furthermore, a full 13% responded that measuring effectiveness was their #1 concern.

For these reasons, eLearning has become a natural way to deliver content to a dispersed audience, with Learning Management Platforms (LMSs) being used to track progress and completion.

Compliance training can have some subtle differences from other kinds of training, however, so not every LMS on the market is an ideal fit for this kind of training. When considering an LMS for managing compliance training, you should ask these 6 questions:

#1: Is the platform easy and intuitive? Compliance training is never very high on an employee’s “to do” list, and anything that makes the task more difficult or time consuming greatly reduces the chances it will get done. Choose a platform that makes it easy for employees to find the content they need easily, consume it quickly, and get back to the other items on their list.

#2: Is the content updated routinely? Compliance training deals with laws and regulations that have a tendency to change over time. A good LMS should have the most up-to-date training content.

#3: Can the platform track individual completion? With compliance, you will need to know, at any moment, who has completed all or just some of their required training. You should also be able to send reminders to those employees who need to finish their training, especially if mandated deadlines are approaching.

#4: Can the platform generate reports and proofs quickly? Internal tracking is one thing. Having the ability to generate a needed report or proof of compliance is something else. This will help your organization maintain any needed records related to compliance training programs and file them with the relevant regulatory authorities.

#5: How is communication handled? For example, can you easily send notifications and reminders about compliance training deadlines? Can you reach out to employees when they are having trouble with the training? Or when new training programs are available? Just how are employees held accountable for their training? These are all questions about the built-in communication capabilities of an LMS, and it is important that these capabilities match your needs.

#6: Is the LMS made with a “checkbox” mentality? Compliance is not just another checkbox to be filled in. The right kinds of compliance training can actually provide a significant ROI for your organization (a topic we cover in our forthcoming white paper). The best LMSs for compliance training are designed with this in mind.

Do you have your questions ready? Let’s test and see if that’s the case: You can check out ej4’s Thinkzoom learning platform, and see how it compares to the competition when it comes to these compliance training-specific questions.